Tending the infinite garden: organizational culture in the Ethereum ecosystem

Abstract

This paper explores the role social imaginaries play in the organization of the Ethereum blockchain community and its associated economy. Specifically, it focuses on the developers, researchers and organizers responsible for Ethereum’s maintenance and upgrades, known as the Core Devs. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we investigate the decentralized decision-making processes inherent in Ethereum’s governance mechanisms. Through interviews with seven Ethereum Core Devs, we examine the presence of previously known social imaginaries and analyze their function in contemporary governance, including Infrastructural Mutualism. We also discuss a previously unexamined social imaginary, the Infinite Garden, which captures the values-inflected work of maintaining the protocol in light of the pressures of corporate institutionalization and economic pragmatism. We discover how in the absence of a formal centralized hierarchy, these social imaginaries set boundaries on the legitimacy of decision-making in Ethereum protocol governance. Further, we comment on the contemporary understanding of sociotechnical imaginaries as institutionally stabilized, finding in Ethereum’s case that culture is the condition that enables stability, whilst also acting as a bulwark against external institutional capture.